LALA Magazine

Fall 2017

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152 LALAmag.com
AS HE WAS PREPARING FOR "VENICE IN
Venice," a satellite exhibition to the 2011 Venice Biennale featuring
works by a broad group of art legends from Venice, California, Billy
Al Bengston and I had a long-winding (and gut-busting)
conversation. We talked about the glaring similarities (and
differences) between the two cities' canal cultures, old legends of
California surf and European motorsport history and the man who
inspired his slick contributions to the show, Italian MotoGP racer
Valentino Rossi.
Invoking some of his earliest fetish finish tropes—and
borrowing the iconic sergeant stripe chevrons he famously painted
on masonite and aluminum sheets with auto lacquer in the '60s (and
on countless other surfaces in the decades thereafter)—Bengston
embellished a pair of traditionally black Italian gondolas in day-glo
hues to mimic the leather suits worn by Rossi and American
motorcycle racer Nicky Hayden. As he told me at the time, "By
turning this slug in the water into something that's not
camouflaged… I'm hoping what I bring to this is a new sensation,
not an advertisement for myself."
So when the curator informed him that the Italian authorities
wouldn't allow the vessels into the canals as a result of their Ducati-
invoking paint jobs, Bengston didn't take it sitting down. "Put the
fucker in the water and let them arrest you," he shot back, adding,
"If you're going to act like a Venice, Californian that's what you do.
Then you won't have to come back again and you'll be happy. You'll
be permanently banned!"
The gondolas eventually made it into the canals and Bengston,
ever the provocateur, goaded me at the conclusion of our interview
to "Just write whatever you want, Michael." Paying little mind to the
comment, I blithely replied, "Sure, Billy, I plan on it." Then he
stopped me cold, "No, I mean make some shit up."
Perhaps it was his prankster past resurfacing or just a cheeky
challenge from a stubborn Kansan who was notoriously competitive
with his famous band of brothers—the renegade Cool School group
of Angeleno artists including Larry Bell, John Altoon, Ken Price,
Don
Bachardy, Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, and Robert
Irwin—that comprised the pioneering Ferus Gallery of Walter
Hopps and Ed Keinholz in the 1950s and '60s. Whatever the case,
this gauntlet of Bengston's always stuck with me over the years.
Probably because he meant it. And probably because far too many
artists these days—typically the commercially successful, emerging-
to-mid-career set—attempt to maintain some PR-managed image
of themselves that doesn't allow for any interpretation, introspection,
or, god forbid, fun. Surely not the type of fun that might come in
the form of a writer they just met weaving fictions about their life
and art. But here's the thing about Billy Al Bengston: fun is (and
always has been) his raison d'être.
"I don't think I made a living doing this until I was at least 50,
and a living back then was making $50 at a time," explains Bengston,
now 82, who was born in Dodge City, Kansas to a tailor father who
owned a dry cleaning business and a musical mother, who once sang
for the San Francisco Opera. Raised with a sartorialist savvy and
Midwestern work ethic, after moving permanently to California
Bengston worked as a beach attendant by day at Doheny State
Beach in Dana Point California—where he met Price—and by
night he studied (i.e. mixed tons of clay in bread mixers) with Peter
Voulkos at Otis College of Art & Design. Sometimes he manned
the high ladder on construction sites with Ed Kienholz, other times
he taught part-time at art schools (stretching from UCLA to
Norman, Oklahoma) to make ends meet. "I didn't give a shit," he
recalls. "I was just having fun surfing,"
As you might imagine, the challenge in embellishing his
outsize life—as Bengston well knows—is daunting in the sense that
any myth or conspiracy you might think to add to his CV has already
"been there, done that" by the artist—decades ago. When he wasn't
red lining his BSA motorcycles at the old Ascot Park speedway on
HOWLIN' AT THE
MOONDOGGIE
For 60 years, Billy Al Bengston has maintained his larger than life rep as the
bad boy of the L.A. art world, but this fall he's offering a glimpse into the
softer, celestial side of his ever-soulful practice at Various Small Fires.
BY MICHAEL SLENSKE PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE PERILLOUX